Folk Dialectics of Nature and CultureMarshall Sahlins

Part IV of M. Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), pp. 93–107.

“So far as I am aware, we are the only society on earth that thinks of itself as having risen from savagery, identified with a ruthless nature. Everyone else believes they are descended from gods. Even if these gods have natural representations, they nonetheless have supernatural attributes. Judging from social behavior, this contrast may well be a fair statement of the differences between ourselves and the rest of the world…” — M. Salins

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.

THOMAS HOBBBS, Leviathan

To discover the lineaments of the larger society in the concepts of its biology is not altogether a “Modern Synthesis.” In Euro-American society this integration has been going on in a particular dialectic way since the seventeenth century. Since Hobbes, at least, the competitive and acquisitive characteristics of Western man have been confounded with Nature, and the Nature thus fashioned in the human image has been in turn reapplied to the explanation of Western man. The effect of this dialectic has been to anchor the properties of human social action, as we conceive them, in Nature, and the laws of Nature in our conceptions of human social action. Human society is natural, and natural societies are curiously human. Adam Smith produces a social version of Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin a naturalized version of Adam Smith; William Graham Sumner thereupon reinvents Darwin as society, and Edward O. Wilson reinvents Sumner as nature. Since Darwin, the movement of the conceptual pendulum has accelerated. Every decade, it seems, we are presented with a more refined notion of man as species, and a more refined species of “natural selection” as man.

In the opening chapters of Leviathan there is presented a picture of man as a self-moving and self-directing machine. C. B. Macpherson, whose reading of Hobbes and explication of “possessive individualism” I here follow very closely, describes the Hobbesian natural man as an “automated machine,” having built into it “equipment by which it alters its motion in response to differences in the material it uses, and to the impact and even the expected impact of other matter on it” (1962, p. 31). The machine is part of the informational system of the world in which it moves, as nothing is present to its mind that was not first present to its senses – “there is no conception in a

man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten by the organs of sense” (Hobbes, part 1, chap. 1; all citations of Leviathan are from the Everyman Paper back edition [1950]). Language introduces the potentiality of error into this sensory epistemology, as also a greater capacity for right movements, but it cannot transcend the intrinsic values of sensory experience. In chapters 5 through 11, the general direction of the machine is indicated. “Felicity of this life,” Hobbes says, “consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied… Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end… Felicity is a continual! Progresse of the desire” (chap. 11). The machine acts to continue its own motion by approaching things that sustain that motion and avoiding things inimical. Motion toward is “desire” (or “appetite”) and its objects are “good.” Motion away is “aversion” and its objects are “evil.” Each human machine “endeavoureth to secure himself against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth” (chap. 12). As the abstract positive and negative of human action, these two motions are comprehensive. They exhaust all particular motivations which are just so many circumstantial modalities of motion toward or motion away. Appetite with the opinion it will be satisfied is “hope”; without this opinion “despair.” Aversion with the anticipation of hurt from the object is “fear”; with the hope of resisting hurt, it is “courage.” And so for anger, confidence, diffidence, indignation, benevolence, covetousness, pusillanimity and magnanimity, liberality and parsimony, kindness, lust or jealousy – they are products of a single-minded concern for one’s own good.

In the eighth chapter, however, Hobbes states the relativity of the calculus of good. Insofar as it is social, it is a differential good. Hobbes argues that the good men value is determined by whatever other men already have. Virtue and worth are only realizable as a differential success, as preeminence, and “consisteth in comparison. For if all things were equally in all men, nothing would be prized” (chap. 8). The success of men in securing their own good thus depends on the strength of their desires and their respective abilities. But then, the pursuit of one’s own good cannot remain at the level of independent production. For the power of one man to obtain his own good is opposed by the powers of others. “The power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the power of another” (cf. Macpherson 1962, pp. 35-6). There is an opposition of powers. And in the end, success turns on the competitive appropriation of the powers of others. A man secures his own good to the extent he can harness the powers of other men. There is a net transfer of powers. The means are all such things as riches, reputation, love, and fear.

“Riches joyned with liberality, is Power; because it procureth friends, and servants… Reputation of Power, is Power; because it draweth with it the adhearence of those that need protection… Also, what quality soever maketh a man beloved, or feared of many, or the reputation of such quality, is Power; because it is rhe means to have the assistance, and service of many.” (chap. 10)

Macpherson notes that in Hobbes’s scheme, men actually enter into a market for the exchange of powers. Men find their worth as the price others will pay for the use of their powers. It is in this mode, as acquisition, that Hobbes put as the “generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death” (chap. 11). As all men are so inclined, no one man can rest secure in his own powers without engaging “by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him” (chap. 13). Hence the famous struggle among men in a state of nature, the “Warre” of

2

every man against every man, enduring so long as they do not agree to surrender their force to a Common Power (the State) that will “keep them all in awe.”

Writing in an era of transition to a developed market society, Hobbes reproduces the historical sequence as a logic of human nature. The expropriation of man by man at which Hobbes arrives in the end is, as Macpherson explains, the theory of action in a fully competitive economy. It differs from a mere struggle for preeminence, as would occur in transitional phases of simple commodity production, because in the model of the latter each man has access to his own means of livelihood and need not convey his powers to other men. Producers may maximize their own position in market exchange; they remain, however, independent proprietors and their labor power as such is not a commodity. The full market system also differs from exploitative structures such as feudalism and slavery, since in the latter conditions, the rights to power, although they may yield a net transfer, are relatively fixed among the classes. No one is free to convey his powers as he will, for none can escape his definition as a social being, definition that presupposes his position in the circulation of powers. Men are slaves and serfs, others are lords and masters, but the system is not competitive such that it would be necessary to struggle after more power just to conserve the amount one has, or else lose out to those stronger in desire or capacity. The full market system refers to the historical time when men do become free to alienate their powers for a price, as some are compelled to do because they lack the productive means to independently realize their own good. This is a very distinctive type of society as well as a particular period of history. It is marked by what Macpherson styles “possessive individualism.” Possessive individualism entails the unique notion – counterpart to the liberation from feudal relations – that men own their own bodies, the use of which they have both the freedom and necessity to sell to those who control their own capital. (It was Marx, of course, who penetrated the inequities of this exchange, that is, the net transfer, since the value produced by labor power is greater than its price.) In such a condition, every man confronts every man as an owner. Indeed, society itself is generated through the acts of exchange by which each seeks the greatest possible benefits in others’ powers at the least possible cost to his own.

It was, Macpherson explains,

“a conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation in determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual… Society becomes a lot of free individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors.” (1962, p. 3; italics added)

Social scientists will recognize in this description the “utilitarianism” that has beset their own disciplines since Spencer and before (cf. Parsons 1968; Sahlins 1976). It is precisely a perspective in which the individual is seen “neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as owner of himself.” In the social sciences, as in sociobiology, the homebred economizing of the market place is then all too easily transposed from the analysis of capitalist society to the explication of society tout court. The analytic place thus left to the social fact has been well described by Louis Dumont:

3

“In modern society... the Human Being is regarded as the indivisible, “elementary” man, both a biological being and a thinking subject. Each particular man in a sense incarnates the whole of mankind. He is the measure of all things (in a full and novel sense). The kingdom of ends coincides with each man’s legitimate ends, so the values are turned upside down. What is still called “society” is the means, the life of each man is the end. Ontologically, the society no longer exists, it is no more than an irreducible datum, which must in no way thwart the demands of liberty and equality. Of course, the above is a description of values, a view of mind… A society as conceived by individualism has never existed anywhere for the reason we have given, namely, that the individual lives on social ideas.” (1970, pp. 9-10)

I underscore Dumont’s observations on the indivisibility of the human being in the perspective of the sociological utilitarianism: man as a thinking subject is also the same man as a biological being. Hence society may be derived from the rational action of individuals seeking to satisfy their needs – a project in which “thought” serves merely as the means and the representation of inherent ends. Sociobiology operates on exactly the same premise. Hobbes provided the original basis for this subordination of the symbolic to the natural by situating the society he knew in the state of nature. Man was seen as a wolf to man. Again one can say that the objective of sociobiologists is very similar so far as it concerns human society. But it goes further. Since they would now extend the same folk conception of capitalism to the animal kingdom as a whole, for sociobiologists it is also true that the wolf is a man to other wolves. Actually, however, I compress a long cycle of reciprocal interpretations of nature and culture that has been characteristic of the Western consciousness, both as science and as ideology. I can briefly describe this cycle by making two further points.

First, it is clear that the Hobbesian vision of man in a natural state is the origin myth of Western capitalism. In modern social practice, the story of Genesis pales by comparison. Yet it is also clear that in this comparison, and indeed in comparison with the origin myths of all other societies, the Hobbesian myth has a very peculiar structure, one that continues to attend our understandings of ourselves. So far as I am aware, we are the only society on earth that thinks of itself as having risen from savagery, identified with a ruthless nature. Everyone else believes they are descended from gods. Even if these gods have natural representations, they nonetheless have supernatural attributes. Judging from social behavior, this contrast may well be a fair statement of the differences between ourselves and the rest of the world. In any case we make both a folklore and a science of our brutish origins, sometimes with precious little to distinguish between them. And just as Hobbes believed that the institution of society or the Commonwealth did not abolish the nature of man as wolf to other men but merely permitted its expression in relative safety, so we continue to believe in the savage within us – of which we are slightly ashamed. At an earlier period it was Homo economicus, with a natural propensity to truck and barter, an idea that rationalized the developing capitalist society to itself. It took but two centuries to evolve another species, Homo bellicosus, or so one might classify that contentious ape popularized by Ardrey and other recent writers. Now comes sociobiology, and with it apparently a reversion to economic type, programmed in the natural propensity of DNA to maximize itself at the expense of whom it may concern.

Hence the response by men of the Left becomes intelligible, as does the interest of the public at large. What is inscribed in the theory of sociobiology is the entrenched

4

ideology of Western society: the assurance of its naturalness, and the claim of its inevitability.

The second point concerns the ideological dialectic to which I previously alluded. Since the seventeenth century we seem to have been caught up in this vicious cycle, alternately applying the model of capitalist society to the animal kingdom, then reapplying this bourgeoisfied animal kingdom to the interpretation of human society. My intent in adopting the Macpherson reading of Hobbes was just to imply that most of the elements and stages of the biological theory of natural selection – from differential success to the competitive struggle to reproduce one’s stock and the transfer of powers – already existed in the Leviathan. As a critic of this capitalist conception, it was left to Marx to discern its realization in Darwinian theory. In a letter to Engels, Marx wrote:

“It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour (read, diversification!, competition, opening up of new markets (niches), ‘inventions’ (variations), and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’s ‘bellum omnium contra omnes,’ and one is reminded of Hegel’s Phenomenology where civil society is described as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom,’ while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society.” (Marx in Schmidt 1971, p. 46)

The same point was to be made later by Hofstadter:

“A parallel can be drawn between the patterns of natural selection and classical economics, suggesting that Darwinism involved an addition to the vocabulary rather than to the substance of conventional economic theory. Both assumed the fundamentally self-interested animal pursuing, in the classical pattern, pleasure or, in the Darwinian pattern, survival. Both assumed the normality of competition in the exercise of the hedonistic, or survival, impulse; and in both it was the ‘fittest,’ usually in a eulogistic sense, who survived or prospered – either the organism most satisfactorily adapted to his environment, or the most efficient and economic producer, the most frugal and temperate worker.” (1959, p. 144)

In a letter to Lavrov, Engels described the ensuing dialectical return, the representation of culture to itself in the form of a capitalist nature:

“The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed... the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and now it is claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.” (Engels in Schmidt 1971, p. 47)

It might be noted that Darwin was not altogether happy with this reciprocal reflection of the animal kingdom as his own English society. “I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib,” he wrote to Sir Charles Lyell, “showing that I have proved ‘might is right,’ and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right” (cited in Hofstadter 1959, p. 85).

But no such reserve would inhibit William Graham Sumner – to take the outstanding American example – from transferring the Darwinian teaching back to its original social source. “The truth is that the social order is fixed by laws of nature precisely

5

analogous to those of the physical order” (Sumner 1934, vol. 2, p. 107). Hofstadter succinctly summarizes Sumner’s inspiration:

“In the Spencerian intellectual atmosphere of the 1870s and 1880s it was natural for conservatives to see the economic contest in competitive society as a reflection of the struggle in the animal world. It was easy to argue by analogy from natural selection of fitter organisms to social selection of fitter men, from organic forms with superior adaptability to citizens with a greater store of economic virtues… The progress of civilization, according to Sumner, depends on the selection process; and that in turn depends upon the workings of unrestricted competition. Competition is a law of nature which ‘can no more be done away with than gravitation,’ and which men can ignore only to their sorrow.” (Hofstadter 1959, p. 57)

One aspect of Sumner’s biologism deserves special comment. It concerns the motivation which Sumner frequently alleged for the accumulation of wealth in a ruthless competitive struggle. This is exactly the same motivation adduced by sociobiology for the parallel struggle in nature – “inheritance” (by the offspring of the fittest). The double service of the term is not unusual. From the late Middle Ages onward, Western society has gone to considerable effort to encode its economic activity within a pervasive metaphor of improvement of the stock. Terms for animal reproduction have been appropriated for economic categories and vice versa, at first figuratively, but then so consistently that metaphor dies and it becomes impossible to distinguish the original reference from the derived. The peculiarity of a native category that refers interchangeably to the social reproduction of economic goods and the natural reproduction of animate beings then goes unnoticed, banished from consciousness as well as memory. On the contrary, the category becomes a basis for scientific or popular reflections on the essential identity of the two processes. These reflections accordingly take the form of a folk etymology. They recapitulate, for example, the derivation of the English terms “capital” and “chattel” from an older “cattle,” which precisely as the movable and increasable “livestock” was distinguished from the dead stock of fixed farm equipment. (Indeed the common origin of the concepts of transactable wealth and cattle in the Indo-European peku, together with the appearance of a cognate category pasū viru in Avestan including men and their domestic animals, suggests a primitive integration of the economic, the social and the natural; modern usage would merely represent a cognitive homology [cf. Benveniste 1969; and relevant entries of the OED].) It is the same with “inheritance,” which initially referred to the continuity of goods over generations of people, only to denote at a later date the continuity of the generational “stock” itself. W. G. Sumner was thus empowered by the fulk wisdom to find cause for the economic competition over resources in a genetic transmission – just as E. O. Wilson would later describe the natural process of genetic transmission as a struggle for resources:

“The socialist assails particularly the institution of bequest or hereditary property… The right of bequest rests on no other grounds than those of expediency. The love of children is the strongest motive to frugality and to the accumulation of capital. The state guarantees the power of bequest only because it thereby encourages the accumulation of capital on which the welfare of society depends... hereditary wealth transmitted from generation to generation is the strongest instrument by which we keep up a steadily advancing civilization.” (Sumner 1934, vol. 2, pp. 112-13)

6

We seem unable to escape from this perpetual movement, back and forth between the culturalization of nature and the naturalization of culture. It frustrates our understanding at once of society and of the organic world. In the social sciences we exhaust our own symbolic capacities in an endless reproduction of utilitarian theorizing, some of it economic, some ecologic. In the natural sciences, it is the vulgar and scientific sociobiologies. All these efforts taken together represent the modern encompassment of the sciences, both of culture and of life, by the dominant ideology of possessive individualism.

The net effect is a curious form of totemism of which scientific sociobiology is the latest incarnation. For if totemism is, as Levi-Strauss says, the explication of differences between human groups by reference to the distinctions between natural species, such that clan A is related to and distinct from clan B as the eagle hawk is to the crow, then sociobiology merits classification as the highest form of the totemic philosophy. For its sophistication and advance over the primitive varieties, both in the West and abroad, it does seem to merit a special name, one in keeping with its own synthetic pretensions as the latest branch of the sciences and the principal hope of civilization. Give it its due: sociobiology is a Scientific Totemism.

But with all respects to the pensee sauvage, this reliance on the deep structure of Western thought, with its assimilation of the reproduction of people to the reproduction of goods as a kinship of substance, cannot do for the science to which we now aspire. The confusion of categories is too immoderate. It puts us all, biological and social scientists alike, in the state known all too well to the practitioners of totemism: of mess and “dirt,” as Mary Douglas has taught us, of pollution and tabu. Beyond all the politics, it is of course this descent into the kingdom of tabu that ultimately makes sociobiology so fascinating. But we pay a heavy penalty in knowledge for the distinctions we are forced to surrender. “The most serious harm to science that I see in the present fashion of applying ethnological terms to animals,” Susan Langer writes, “is that – odd as it may seem – it is really based on the assumption that the two studies, ethnology and what is called ‘ethology’... will never become true integral parts of biological science. If they should ever do so, the use of words literally in one context and figuratively in another would cause havoc” (1971, p. 328). Yet we stand to lose even more than our science. We should have to abandon all understanding of the human world as meaningfully constituted, and so the one best hope of knowing ourselves.

REFERENCES

Benveniste, Emile. 1969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes; vol. 1: Economic, parente, societe. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1950 (1651). Leviathan. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1959. Social Darwinism in American thought. Revised edition. New York: Braziller.

Langer, Susanne K. 1971. The great shift: Instinct to intuition. In Man and beast: Comparative social behavior, ed. J. F. Eisenberg, and W. S. Dillon. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 314-32.

7

Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The political theory of possessive individualism. London: Oxford University Press.

Parsons, Talcott. 1968. The structure of social action. 2 vols. New York: The Free Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schmidt, Alfred. 1971. The concept of nature in Marx. London: NLB.

Summer, William Graham. 1934. Essays of William Graham Sumner. 2 vols. Ed. A. G. Keller, and M. R. Davie. New Haven: Yale University Press.

8